Get the Most From Your Massage Treatment

Whether or not you are a newbie to the massage therapy world, or a veteran, learning how to get the most from your massage therapy treatments is sometimes a bit of a mystery. As a massage therapist at a busy sports & physiotherapy clinic, and a massage therapy patient myself, here are my tips for getting the most out of your treatment.

1. Depending on the reasons you are going for treatment, be discerning in your choice of facility. If you are going for a relaxation treatment it is going to be a bit easier to find a suitable therapist and facility than if you are going for an injury related treatment. Word of mouth is a great way to get started in your search.

2. When you’ve made your appointment, be sure to arrive early, especially if you have to fill out a health history form. This ensures that you are relaxed, and that you are ready at your appointment time. (this also demonstrates respect for your therapists time, something that we appreciate.)

3. Fill out your health history accurately. Whether or not you think something is relevant, your therapist needs to know in order to provide a safe and effective treatment. This includes past surgeries and accidents, and past or present diagnosis. He or she can’t ensure your safety if the information you’ve provided is inaccurate, incomplete or misrepresented. And, on a legal note, he or she can’t be held liable if you’ve withheld or misrepresented your health information.

4. Don’t eat a large meal within 1-2 hours before getting a treatment – your body is busy digesting, and honestly, it’s just plain uncomfortable to lie on a full stomach.

5. Empty your bladder before your treatment time. Think of it this way – have you ever tried to sit through a long movie when you really have to go? Exactly, except it feels 10x worse when you’re laying on a full bladder. (trust me!)

6. Communicate with your therapist. If you are nervous or want to ask a question, it’s your right to express how you’re feeling. The same goes for your comfort level during the treatment. Personally, I want to know if there might be potential issues so I can pre-empt any confusion and establish a therapeutic relationship of trust and respect.

7. Let your therapist know if you want to talk or not. I generally take a client’s lead – if he or she speaks to me, then I respond; if not, then I keep quiet except for asking about comfort levels. If you find that your therapist is chatty, but you want to “zone out”, tell them so.

8. Understand that if you are being treated for a specific condition, compliance is important with treatment plans, homecare and remedial exercise. Since massage therapy is a passive therapy, it is only about 20% of the recovery process from injury or conditions. Follow therapeutic recommendations and you will prolong the positive effects of treatment and improve much more quickly.

If for any reason you are not happy with treatment, or don’t feel you have a good relationship with your therapist, it’s OK to find someone else. Not everyone is a perfect fit for every massage therapist, and vice versa. You are investing your time and money to achieve a result, so it’s your right to find someone who can help you achieve the desired results.

For more information, please refer to Massage Therapy Client Rights and Massage Therapy Client Obligations and Responsibilities.

© Copyright 2010
www.whymassagetherapy.com
All Rights Reserved.

Work Related Stress Can Kill

Very compelling evidence how everyday stress at work can not only make you miserable, it can also kill you. (May I suggest massage therapy for some stress relief?)

LONDON (Reuters) – (Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Caroline Drees)

Work really can kill you, according to a study on Wednesday providing the strongest evidence yet of how on-the-job stress raises the risk of heart disease by disrupting the body’s internal systems.

The findings from a long-running study involving more than 10,000 British civil servants also suggest stress-induced biological changes may play a more direct role than previously thought, said Tarani Chandola, an epidemiologist at University College London.

“This is the first large-scale population study looking at the effects of stress measured from everyday working life on heart disease,” said Chandola, who led the study. “One of the problems is people have been sceptical whether work stress really affects a person biologically.”

Heart disease is the world’s leading cause of death. It is caused by fatty deposits that harden and block arteries, high blood pressure which damages blood vessels, and other factors.

The researchers measured stress among the civil servants by asking questions about their job demands such as how much control they had at work, how often they took breaks, and how pressed for time they were during the day.

The team conducted seven surveys over a 12-year period and found chronically stressed workers — people determined to be under severe pressure in the first two of the surveys — had a 68 percent higher risk of developing heart disease.

The link was strongest among people under 50, Chandola said.

“This study adds to the evidence that the work stress-coronary heart disease association is causal in nature,” the researchers wrote in the European Heart Journal.

Behaviour and biological changes likely explain why stress at work causes heart disease, Chandola said. For one, stressed workers eat unhealthy food, smoke, drink and skip exercise — all behaviours linked to heart disease.

In the study, stressed workers also had lowered heart rate variability — a sign of a poorly-functioning weak heart — and higher-than-normal levels of cortisol, a “stress” hormone that provides a burst of energy for a fight-or-flight response.

Too much cortisol circulating in the blood stream can damage blood vessels and the heart, Chandola said.
“If you are constantly stressed out these biological stress systems become abnormal,” Chandola said.

(Reporting by Michael Kahn; Editing by Maggie Fox and Caroline Drees)

Original article Study finds work-related stress can kill by Michael Kahn Tue Jan 22, 8:24 PM ET published on Reuters.com.

Core Muscle Stability and Back Pain

Forget abdominal crunches, use a balance ball to strengthen your core and relieve back pain.

Back pain can be a mysterious complaint, and for some seems to come “out of nowhere” – leaving us scratching our heads at this mysterious development in our health. As a massage therapist for 9 years, I can testify to the fact that back pain is one of the most common and debilitating conditions afflicting humankind, and idiopathic back pain (meaning no discernable cause) is seldom a result of just one factor.

Now that I’m a “little” older, it has come to my attention that the body I remember having when I was a youngster of 25 was a lot firmer and stronger than the body I’m inhabiting now. What I’m trying to say, in a roundabout way, is that our bodies change over time. Life happens, we get married (or not), have children (or not) and often because we feel good, we don’t recognize that our bodies lose strength. Many of us sit at desks all day, and we forget that our bodies are designed to move, not be stationary in one position for any length of time. We take for granted that we will always be as strong and fit as we remember, and that’s just not the case. This sedentary lifestyle can happen easily, and before we know it we have a niggling little pain in our back that can quickly take a turn for the worse if left untreated.

One of the most common reasons for back pain is weakness in the transversus abdominus, the most famous of the “core” muscles. The transversus abdominus is also known in therapeutic occupations as the TA, and is responsible for acting like a support for the trunk of the body and for “containing” the internal organs. It attaches at the back on the spine of your low back, and like a weight belt or girdle, wraps around your body and attaches to the linea alba, a fibrous band that runs from the xiphoid process of your sternum to your pubic bone.

How does this muscle get weak? Lack of movement/exercise and injury are 2 common reasons, and for our purposes today, we’ll focus on how exercise can strengthen this important muscle and help relieve back pain.

It is very important to learn how to consciously engage this muscle – that is, to contract the muscle at will. The issue here is that many people are not very body-aware, and to learn this can take some time. Often people who are very weak through here may have never been very strong, and will have to take their time. Rome, after all, was not built in one day.

How can the transversus abdominus be strengthened? I do recommend starting slowly, challenging the muscles gently by sitting on a balance ball, which is much harder than it looks. When we are seated on an unstable surface, our small “intrinsic” muscles of the spine as well as the TA must continually contract, relax and adjust to keep us upright.

The important thing to remember is that your feel should be flat on the floor, your thighs should be a 90 degree angle to the trunk, and the knees should also be bent at 90 degrees. Any more of an angle and the ball is too low, any less of an angle the ball is too high. (see picture to the right of a Gaiam Balance Ball Chair). This deceptively simple exercise can be very tiring, but works wonders to strengthen the core and relieve low back pain.

Personally, having had a serious back injury myself, I don’t recommend doing adbominal crunches, and certainly not on a stability or balance ball, until you have regained strength and conscious control of the transversus abdominus. Crunches also primarily exercise the rectus abdominus, which run vertically from the pubic bone to the sternum (on both sides of the linea alba). Have you ever seen a person walking, looking like he or she has the bum tucked under their body? Strengthening the rectus abdominus to the exclusion of the other muscles of the body causes this tucking, and takes the natural lordotic curve out of the low back.

What I would suggest is that the transversus abdominus be challenged gently and frequently.

How, you wonder, can I do this at work all day?

Well, it is very common to see people at their desks sitting on balance balls, and I have even performed therapeutic massage while sitting on one. The drawback to this is that it’s hard to move around – for example, from your computer to the printer a few feet away. (for me, it was moving from a clients head to his or her arm or side) You can get the same benefit of sitting on a balance ball with much more versatility if you invest in a Balance Ball Chair. This “chair” is basically a removable balance ball sitting on a frame with lockable castor wheels. It also has a back on it and comes with an air pump and an exercise guide.

This works because you are still sitting on a squishy, moving surface, and any shift in your weight will cause muscles to activate to maintain your upright position. At the end of the day, you can take the ball off of the frame or setting and do more exercises.

Stay tuned for many more posts on back pain.

© Copyright 2008-2009
Jodi Forsythe
www.whymassagetherapy.com
All Rights Reserved.

Massage Therapy – treatment option for back pain funded by the NHS?

I recently read an article on the BBC website which states that the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (or NICE) in Britain suggests massage therapy as one treatment option for back pain sufferers. In addition, NICE also suggests that the NHS (National Health Service) fund certain alternative therapies to allow patient access.

In addition to massage therapy, acupuncture and exercise are also suggested as possible interventions for back pain. This is huge for practitioners of complementary and alternative therapies as well as back pain sufferers, that an organization as large as the NICE is, for the first time in its history, is openly advocating such types of interventions.

According to the article, one in 3 Brits suffer from back pain (no surprise there) – a condition where the cause can be very elusive, and which can quickly become debilitating if not treated successfully. For more information on the recommendations, check out the original article on BBC Health News.

This is the first of several posts dealing with back pain causes, symptoms and massage therapy as an intervention. In the meantime, check out the following informational video on managing back pain.